Facebook Ads on a Budget

While the big spenders may make the most noticeable impact, you can still drive results with Facebook ads on a budget. But, how?

Small budgets can get results, but you can’t follow the same rules that the advertisers with big budgets follow. It just won’t work.

Let’s talk about where your focus should be with a small budget. And to be clear, I’m talking about budgets under $50 per day — so $1,500 and under per month.

Let’s go…

1. Focus on the Low-Hanging Fruit

One of the most difficult challenges for low budgets is generating sales. While the big budgets can push lots of dollars through the system to optimize for cold audiences to get sales, that just isn’t realistic with small budgets.

Why? You generally need to get 25-50 conversions per week to exit the learning phase and get optimal results. If you’re selling a $100 product, you might be able to accomplish that, but only if all of your budget is on a single campaign.

The low-hanging fruit here are those who are most likely to buy. For example…

People who have bought from you before. This is especially the case if your product is something that may be bought on a schedule (it lasts 90 days before a refill is needed).

Isolate these people. You likely send email reminders to this group. Go after them with ads, too.

People who abandoned their online shopping cart. Go after the people who were thinking about buying, but didn’t follow through. This includes those who abandoned their shopping cart or simply visited a product page without buying.

If you can, give these people a discount or other benefits to get them to complete the process.

You have a small budget, but that’s perfect in these cases. Repeat buyers and abandoned carts will be small audiences. Use Reach optimization to reach these people (or Landing Page Views or a conversions event further up the funnel if you get more volume).

These groups represent the “low-hanging fruit” because it’s where you can get the most bang for your buck.

2. Build Your Email List

Email still does an amazing job of driving both traffic and purchases. The cost to get an opt-in will be far less than the cost to get a purchase. You will then have time to convince these people to eventually buy.

Build your funnel by building your email list with ads.

Offer something of value that inspires your potential customer to hand over their email address — because an email address (and their inbox) has value. The offer you make will depend on your industry.

3. Build Your Remarketing Lists

What you do here will depend upon the creative strengths of your organization. What content do you do best?

If you have strong creative writers who can answer questions of prospective customers, write articles and drive traffic to those articles with ads.

If you have a videographer, create entertaining and helpful videos. Use ads to drive engagement and awareness.

Whatever it is you create, create it with the intention of providing value. The higher the value, the easier (and less expensive) it will be to drive people to those things.

The value of this content may not be immediately obvious. But, when done right, the people who consume this content are sending a signal that they have interest in your product, service, or industry. You can use this for targeting later.

The traffic that you generate will help build quality website custom audiences. The video engagement you generate will help build video engagement audiences and page engagement audiences.

Splitting Your Budget

These three areas can be promoted rather inexpensively, if necessary. Generally, you should prioritize the “low-hanging fruit.” How much you spend there will depend upon the size of the audiences you can target. And if they aren’t big enough, you will build them with the other two approaches.

If you lack budget, prioritize these approaches in this order. You absolutely can make an impact.

Your Turn

How do you find success with Facebook ads while managing a tight budget?

Let me know in the comments below!